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THIS BOOK HAS been germinating for a long time. In the late 1990s I wrote a few articles pointing toward it—about American politics morphing into show business and baby boomers trying to stay forever young, about untrue conspiracy theories being mainstreamed and the explosion of talk radio as it became more and more about the hosts’ wild opinions.
But the ideas and arguments really started crystallizing in 2004 and 2005. First President George W. Bush’s political mastermind Karl Rove introduced the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People “in the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.
Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed in this particular, peculiar way, I realized. Until the 2000s, truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made much sense as jokes.
The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will.
Much more than the other billion or two people in the rich world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and miraculous, in Satan on Earth now, reports of recent trips to and from Heaven, and a several-thousand-year-old story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.
Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” At least half are absolutely certain Heaven exists, ruled over by a personal God—not some vague force or universal spirit but a guy. More than a third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists, government, and journalists.
A quarter believe vaccines cause autism and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 general election. A quarter believe that our previous president was (or is?) the Antichrist. A quarter believe in witches. Remarkably, no more than one in five Americans believe the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—around the same number who believe that “the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals” and that U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.fn2
The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet that hated Establishment, the institutions and forces that once kept us from overdoing the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, politics, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—has enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the last few decades.
The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable. As particular fantasies get traction and become contagious, other fantasists are encouraged by a cascade of out-of-control tolerance. It’s a kind of twisted Golden Rule unconsciously followed: If those people believe that, then certainly we can believe this.
And the modern tipping points for both kinds were the result of the same two momentous changes. The first was that profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the 1960s, whereby Americans ever since have had a new rule set in their mental operating systems, even if they’re certain they possess the real truth: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. The paradigm can be explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, but it’s the way we are now. The second big enabling change was the new era of information and communications.
THIS IS NOT unique to America, people treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously. We’re just uniquely immersed. In the developed world, our predilection is extreme, distinctly different in the breadth and depth of our embrace of fantasies of many different kinds. Sure, the physician whose fraudulent research launched the antivaccine movement was a Brit, and young Japanese otaku invented cosplay, dressing up as fantasy characters. And while there are believers in flamboyant supernaturalism and prophecy and religious pseudoscience in other developed
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America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for
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Ours was the first country ever designed and created from nothing, the first country authored, like an epic tale—at the very moment, as it happened, that Shakespeare and Cervantes were inventing modern fiction.
his screed to the archbishop himself. If all this had happened in 1447, say, the episode might now be an obscure historical footnote. But because this young preacher, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, went public in 1517, a good half-century into the age of mechanical printing, his manifesto changed everything. The Ninety-five Theses were immediately printed,
He insisted that clergymen have no special access to God or Jesus or truth. Everything a Christian needed to know was in the Bible. So every individual Christian believer could and should read and interpret Scripture for him-or herself. Every believer, Protestants said, was now a priest.
In the 1450s, when Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book—a Latin Bible—there were only thirty thousand books of any kind in all of Europe, about one for every twenty-five hundred people. But by the time Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, sixty years later, twenty million books had been printed—and more of them were Bibles than anything else.
No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon.
Thus the first English-speaking Americans tended to be the more wide-eyed and desperately wishful. “Most of the 120,000 indentured servants and adventurers who sailed to the [South] in the seventeenth century,” according to the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall’s history of America, Freedom Just Around the Corner, “did not know what lay ahead but were taken in by the propaganda of the sponsors.”
For the imminent next wave of English would-be Americans, however, propagating a particular set of Christian superstitions, omens and divine judgments were more than just lip-service cover for dreams of easy wealth. For them, the prospect of colonization was all about the export of their supernatural fantasies to the New World.
Queen Elizabeth had been the first Protestant English monarch. Her successor James was a Protestant too. As soon as he took the throne, he ordered up a new official English translation of the Bible—the King James Version, which four hundred years later remains the most popular Bible in America.
By the early 1600s, most people in England (and a third of Europeans) were Protestant.
The most extreme of the extremists were the Separating Puritans, who wanted to form their own separate churches apart from the Church of England. Among this hard core were a pair of ministers and their congregants in and around the perfectly named village of Scrooby. They decided to go further, separating not just from the Church of England but from England itself. In 1609 they exiled themselves to the closest foreign place where Protestantism was on the rise, the Netherlands.
It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies. The more run-of-the-mill people seeking a financial payoff, who abandoned their dream once it was defunct? Eh. We also prefer to talk about Pilgrims rather than Puritans, because the former has none of the negative connotations that stuck permanently to the latter.
But what made the Puritans so American, as they self-consciously invented America, wasn’t just the Protestant zealotry. Rather, it was the paradoxical combination of their beliefs and temperament. They were over-the-top magical thinkers but also prolific readers and writers. They were excruciatingly rational fantasists who regarded theology as an elaborate scientific endeavor. They were whacked-out visionaries but also ambitious bourgeois doers, accomplished managers and owners and makers.
Men began attending the gatherings as well, and she added a second weekly session. Enlightened and emboldened, her followers took to walking out of church in the middle of sermons by ministers they weren’t feeling. Anne Hutchinson, resident in America for only a thousand days, was leading a movement to make her colony of magical thinkers even more fervid. Protestantism had started as a breakaway movement of holier-than-thou zealots—and in the even-holier-than-thou zealots’ state-of-the-art utopia, they now had a still-holier-than-thou mystic militant in their midst.
No, Hutchinson is so American because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality. She’s so American because, unlike the worried, pointy-headed people around her, she didn’t recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true.
The Puritans, who had been conspiracy-fearing truth-tellers even before they turned themselves into Americans, became more fantastically so. They’d escaped one unholy conspiracy—the Antichrist and his popish confederates running the English churches—only to find themselves on the western front of the global holy war. They’d made their difficult (but thrilling!) pilgrimage from the frying pan into a terrible (but thrilling!) fire. Governor Increase Mather’s son Cotton, after his father the most famous American Puritan minister, described the “Droves of Devils in our way” as “demons in the shape
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Over the next two generations, as the English population quintupled, exceeding the Indians’, the natives naturally grew … restless. As a result, after a half-century the settlers’ long-standing fantasy of a pan-Indian conspiracy became self-fulfillingly real: the natives finally did form a multitribal alliance to fight back. The public case for wiping out the newly militant Indians remained supernatural, however. For Christians who imagined themselves battling satanic beasts, conventional rules of war no longer applied.
In Europe, the learned had entered The Age of Reason. In the New World, however, unreason had made a ferocious comeback.
In the 1640s the Puritans in Connecticut and Massachusetts began indicting a couple of people each year for witchcraft. But they fined and banished and acquitted more witches than they hung, thus proving to themselves their moderation. That early hysteria over sorcery subsided, and for two generations New England wasn’t executing witches.
and at least twenty witches and sorcerers (and two satanic pet dogs) were executed.
No doubt there was cynicism among accusers, girls who pressed cases they probably knew were false, and among defendants who confessed to save themselves. But my strong hunch is that the Salem trials were not mainly a willful sham. I’m sure Cotton Mather believed the nonsense he wrote. And many or most of the other principals in Salem in 1692 surely believed what they said. The girls did have dreams and hallucinations they thought had been induced by witches and sorcerers. The judges did think they were battling Satan. And many among the fifty people who confessed to witchcraft believed they
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For Increase Mather, the problem in Salem was that Satan had bewitched some of the accusers into making false accusations—the devil made the good people do it. As the historian Edmund Morgan has written, “In 1692 virtually no one in New England … disbelieved in witches.”
THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.
Despite his low-key sobriety, he had a knack for making believers go wild, and he was at the center of what eventually became known as the Great Awakening. Five generations after the first Puritans arrived, the zealotry had diminished. Americans still read the Bible and went to church, but the religious boil had become more of a simmer. Reverend Edwards found he could turn up the heat, whipping proper New Englanders into ecstatic and agonizing deliriums that he and they took to be miraculous proofs of God. Especially the kids. The Great Awakening got started as America’s first youthquake.fn2
More preachers awakened more congregations. Their listeners didn’t just pledge to stop sinning and believe more strongly in God. They didn’t just read and discuss the Bible and the sermons. In the middle of church services, respectable people felt the Holy Spirit, which produced “the Affections”—moaning, weeping, screaming, jerking, fainting.
As the Great Awakening spread, the Christian Establishment loathed all the embarrassing emotional displays of me me me fanaticism—as one critic at the time wrote, these awful “perturbations of mind, possessions of God, ecstatic flights and supernatural impulses.” Sure, the religion was founded on stories of miracles and individual visions and revelations, but whoa … miracles and revelations right here, right now? To which the delirious mob responded yes, exactly. Whitefield wrote that the “screamings, tremblings” that he and other evangelists provoked were surely just like the “sudden agonies
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As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That’s the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.
Franklin and his fellow Founders’ conceptions of God tended toward the vague and impersonal, a Creator who created and then got out of the way. The “enthusiasts” of the era—channelers of the Holy Spirit, elaborate decoders of the divine plan, proselytizers—were not their people. John Adams fretted in a letter to Jefferson that his son John Quincy might “retire … to study prophecies to the end of his life.” Adams wrote to a Dutch friend that the Bible consists of “millions of fables, tales, legends,” and that Christianity had “prostituted” all the arts “to the sordid and detestable purposes of
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Yet ordinary American people were apparently still much more religious than the English. In 1775 Edmund Burke warned his fellow members of Parliament that the X factor driving the incipient colonial rebellion was exactly that, the uppity Americans’ peculiar ultra-Protestant zeal. For them, Burke said, religion “is in no way worn out or impaired.”
“The motto of enlightenment,” Kant wrote the year after America won its war of independence, “is … Sapere aude!” or Dare to know. “Have courage to use your own understanding!”
The Age of Reason had led to the Enlightenment, smart rationalists and empiricists were behind both, so … right? No. “The familiar and often unquestioned claim that the Enlightenment was a movement concerned exclusively with enthralling reason over the passions and all other forms of human feeling or attachment, is … simply false,” writes the UCLA historian Anthony Pagden in The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters. “The Enlightenment was as much about rejecting the claims of reason and of rational choice as it was about upholding them.” The Enlightenment gave license to the freedom of all
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Americans had the peculiar fate of believing they could and must answer those religious questions the same way mathematicians and historians and natural philosophers answered theirs.
A bestselling work of fiction in the 1800s, The Legends of the American Revolution, 1776, included a story called “The Fourth of July, 1776.” A quasi-angel—“a tall slender man … dressed in a dark robe”—mysteriously appears among the Founders in Philadelphia and delivers a five-minute speech (“God has given America to be free!”) that makes them finally stop arguing and sign the Declaration. Then he mysteriously disappears. Americans from across the religious spectrum chose to regard that fantasy as historical fact, and they still do today.fn1
An equivalent American gathering today, as a fraction of the U.S. population, would be more than a million people. As the Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin and Harold Bloom of Yale have both noted, Cane Ridge was the Woodstock for American Christianity, an anarchic, unprecedented August moment of mass spectacle that crystallized and symbolized a new way of thinking and acting, a permanent new subculture.
The Shakers’ maximum membership coincided with their maximum hysteria beginning in the 1830s, their so-called Era of Manifestations, when members—especially young female ones—had fits during which they believed they traveled to Heaven and communicated with the dead. That’s just when Tocqueville attended a Shaker service. He was flabbergasted and privately appalled.
Joseph attended school for only a couple of years, but he was a charming and popular boy who found he could make easy money indulging a particular folk fantasy. Many of his neighbors, like lots of Americans at the time, had come to believe the landscape was studded with buried loot—old Spanish or Indian gold, tranches of robbers’ cash, lost jewels.
The angel was named Moroni, a name that doesn’t appear in the Bible. Moroni told him that the heretofore unknown remainder of the Bible, its text engraved in Egyptian hieroglyphs on golden plates, happened to have been buried fourteen centuries earlier four miles south of the Smiths’ house, along with two ancient seer stones with which Joseph would be able to translate it.
On Easter Sunday in 1800 at St. Paul’s in London, the main cathedral of the Church of England, only six people received communion.
In the United States, meanwhile, supernaturally focused sects arose and boomed, some of them soon dominating whole regions—the Baptists in the South, the Mormons in Utah. They were really new religious species, Harold Bloom argues in The American Religion, as different from the Christianity that preceded them as Christianity had been from Judaism when it began. America was still exceptional and growing more so.
